Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Europe? More Like ‘You’re Out’
European data privacy laws mainly deal with privacy. Duh. But there is another motivating factor behind their enforcement: antitrust remedies.
Europeans have different privacy standards. What might be considered a consumer protection suit in America could be a human rights case in Europe.
But there is also a strong political appetite to diminish the market power of US-based Big Tech and give potential homegrown businesses a chance to shine, a sentiment that has helped buoy privacy actions.
Europe’s top court formalized the connection between data protection and antitrust this week (on Independence Day, lol) when it ruled against an appeal by Meta. The tech giant had maintained that Germany’s antitrust regulator had overstepped its remit in prosecuting based on a data protection ruling, Reuters reports.
“Data is a decisive factor in establishing market power,” said Andreas Mundt, president of the German Data Cartel, the victor in this case. “The use of the very personal data of consumers by the large internet companies can also be abusive under antitrust law.”
A New Kind Of Series
Netflix just upped the ante to woo advertisers with more interesting ad formats and products.
The streamer is in talks with buyers about “episodic” campaigns that would allow them to create miniseries-type ads using multiple sequential and related spots, rather than showing the same commercial every break. Buyers can also filter ads to avoid certain titles or types of violent content.
This level of personalization requires direct relationships with viewers and advertisers, which is why Netflix intends to build its own ad server instead of relying on Microsoft, a source tells Financial Times.
“Microsoft is the interim ad server, but that’ll change when Netflix [finishes] building their own,” per FT.
Netflix also plans to push for new subscriber growth in its ad-supported tier because, well, advertisers have to reach a wider audience for the juice to be worth the squeeze.
Still, ad prices could pose a problem. Netflix’s sky-high CPMs might pass in the first year or two when there’s still a novelty factor. But the streamer will need to work harder to justify the rate moving forward.
Limited Reach
Twitter owner Elon Musk is still committing unforced errors in running the ad platform, CNBC reports.
The latest incident was a surprise holiday weekend decision to limit how many tweets users can view per day.
Originally, Musk said Twitter Blue subscribers could access 6,000 tweets per day – meaning that even subscribers were rate-limited – while unverified accounts had 600 and new accounts 300. The rates were later raised to 10,000, 1,000 and 500, respectively.
Musk called it a temporary measure to fight data scraping and bot activity. But he offered no timeline or specific examples of these types of violations.
Critics say the rate limits are related to Twitter’s diminished bandwidth since Musk dramatically reduced the platform’s data center capacity and has alternately disputed and not paid Twitter’s Google Cloud bill.
Speaking of, Google now says any limits imposed on its ability to crawl Twitter prevent it from surfacing tweets in search results. Tweets stopped surfacing in Apple’s messaging app, too.
There probably aren’t many blue-chip advertiser accounts left, but still, it would be tough to explain to them why a rate limit dropped out of thin air over a major weekend of shopping and American consumption. Can’t wait to see how Twitter trips itself on Prime Day.
But Wait, There’s More!
A US federal judge stops government officials from contacting social media platforms about content moderation. [Reuters]
Why this investment analyst says Disney should sell itself to solve some of its most crushing problems. [NextTV]
Inside Reddit’s journey to an IPO. [Insider]
Speaking of IPO, Yahoo is planning to go public (again). [FT]
AI and the automation of work. [Ben Evans]
TikTok sells a lot of books. Now it might become a publisher. [NYT]
